Thursday, November 13, 2008

It's the little things...


So my doctor yesterday (not my regular doctor, but I was there and in a mood to take my pants off so what the hell) didn't notice my somewhat hairy legs or my freshly shaven underarms. He did however complement my exceptionally clean belly button.


Yes, my belly button.


Apparently he has seen patients with a thick wool sweater in there and was moved to complement me on my vacant one.


And this is one of the reasons I could never be a doctor.


I'm a big medical geek. I read the Merck Manual for fun. I watch a lot of Discovery Health. I drove to Charlotte in January to see Body Worlds. I love to read about odd diseases and deformities. You think I would be perfect to be a doctor.


No. First, I hate needles. I don't think I could ever draw blood from someone. Besides that, do you know how doctors learn to draw blood? They practice on each other. No thanks. You don't get near my veins without being a phlebotomist with ten years experience and a Flintstones Chewable Valium for me. So no way in Hell would I be a blood letting dummy.


Second, I'm too emotional. I couldn't tell someone they were dying or had lost a pregnancy or was paralyzed. I cried through half of Wall-E. There are movies I haven't seen and don't intend to ever see because they're too sad. The bad part of medicine would break me.


Even if I did move past these little road blocks to become an actual doctor I couldn't deal with the nasty people I would end up seeing. The fact that it is not a common practice to wiggle a soapy finger around in your belly button every night is scary to me. I couldn't deal with doing a pap on a woman who hasn't changed her underwear in days, or examining the scalp of someone who doesn't wash their hair more often than once a month, or looking at an ingrown toenail of someone who doesn't wear socks. I know humans are gross, but that's why we have soap and water. I know that Americans are considered nuerotic by the rest of the world because we bathe everyday but i'm ok with that.


I just don't see why people with running water and a dollar in their pocket can't get clean. If you're homeless, I get it. Otherwise, come on. Soap is cheap. Water is less cheap, but take a bird bath. Wash your hair everyother day. There is no excuse.


And that is what I would end up telling the dirty people I would see as a doctor. And they would get all offended and I would end up paying off my medical school loans by working in a Jiffy Lube.


So anyway, body hair isn't an issue for my doctor. Belly button lint is.


Another interesting thing he told me is that when diabetics loose circulation in their feet the first thing they loose is their toe hair. (He told me this after noticing the few hairs on my toe I didn't even think about shaving, but ususally do.) So toe hair is good.


As a final note i'll warn you not to do a Google Image Search for belly button. You will find many, many pictures of people who have had tattoos done on their stomach with the belly button to be various bodily openings. It's gross. A bit clever I admit. I never would have thought of that, but maybe that's a good thing. But yeah, gross.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I put deodorant in my navel every night when I take a shower so I wont't get that disgusting albeit unique belly-button BO.

Medicine is a hard field. As you know, I did clinicals at the Murdoch center in Butner, and it cured me from any desire at all to work in the medical field. People got sponge baths every day, but not actual showers. Which is NOT NOT NOT the same thing. Those people reeked. I had to help out with all kinds of disgusting procedures, like helping give an elderly retarded woman a pap smear, helping out with the lancing of a boil, feedings, changing a feeding tube, wiping ass, baths, all that shit. Man, lemme say, FUCK THAT. The day with the boil was the last straw for me. I decided on the bus ride back to South Granville that I was going to major in either English, History, Anthropology or Journalism.

During my last semester of graduate school, I was taking this Shakespeare seminar, and I had to do a project on his Measure for Measure. Syphillis and prostitution feature prominently in the play, so I decided to do a fifteen minute presentation on the treatment of syphillis in the 16th century. I was looking for a picture of a mercury tub for treating it, and I put in "syphillis, mercury, tub" into Google. Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the Shepherds. I saw so many pictures of people's whoo-hoos with syphillis I couldn't finish my lunch.

Never did find a picture of the tub though.
:)